FreeCharity.org.uk provides free blog hosting and internet services to charities and the non-profit sector. Getting your organization on the Internet shouldn’t be expensive or complicated and we specialize in a simple and flexible publishing system that can be used with little to no training. Read more about our innovative blog hosting.

We also provide consultancy on larger projects, specializing in blogging, WordPress, perl, security and web accessibility.

I’ve written a short and simple plugin that embeds a web based petition into your WordPress page or post. Signatures are confirmed by e-mail and the administrative interface allows for customization along with deletion and exporting of signatures.

This could be a useful campaigning tool for your charity or organisation. Download it now.

Update: Thanks to Francesco Santini for an Italian translation, Enver Varisli for a Dutch translation and Jiang Zhanyong for a simplified chinese translation.

Traditionally the main source of e-mail addresses for spammers has been from crawling web pages in the same way as search engines. Addresses published on the web are likely to receive more spam than those that are not.
To reduce this problem, two methods been used to avoid publishing e-mail addresses: hiding the published address, or replacing addresses with a contact form. Here we explain how both make poor choices for the usability of your website.

Continue reading “Spam, e-mail addresses and contact forms: are you making these usability mistakes?”

There’s been a lot of talk on the UK-Riders mailing list about the tendency for discussions to be subverted into an argument for the use of free and open source software (FOSS). The voluntary and charitable sectors are a difficult audience. As Free Software proponents, we feel that our software is a superior choice, but we can quickly forget that the people we work with have a much more pragmatic view of the world; they have problems that need solving. Here are some tips for advocating Free Software to charities and volunteers.

Continue reading “Free software advocacy for the VCS”